Glenn Kubish

Here are three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude last week as summer settled into Edmonton for its day in the sun. Three Things podcast, episode 128:                                1. Noses Before I realized that I hadn’t broken my nose or knocked my teeth out, I knew I had to get to safety—fast. I’d been on my skateboard, practising gliding off the city sidewalk onto the asphalt street in front of our house. There is no fancy name for this move. It’s not a fancy move. It’s what any eight-year-old skateboarder can do.  And I did do it, until, that last time, I hit a pebble in the gutter. It was enough to stop my right front wheel dead. I flew forward. In a blink, the front street transformed from a calm pool of blacktop into an angry wave crashing at me.  With a smack! I landed face first on the road. My right palm and left forearm did their best to cushion the impact, but t...

The penny dropped . I love that idiom. I am old enough to remember pennies. I was around when the government dropped the penny from circulation. I love short sentences. I love the stubbornness of solid idioms from analog times. What's better than that click sound I hear in my mind when someone voices the idiom? (The absolute best is when banker Dave Mowat employs it.)  The penny dropped is the sound of realization, the testimony that insight, like starlight, takes time to arrive, and, when it does, it resonates. Just like a coin-in-slot machine come to life when the stuck penny drops. Peas, too. Shelagh was talking the other day about children and their young taste buds. I don't know how the subject came up. For the most part I stay in touch with the subject matter of current podcasts when Shelagh summarizes key points from the 100 or so she stays current with. So, maybe the observation about taste buds was from a pea podcast she had heard, I don't know. The t...